Uprising

Rating:
Summary: So Much Hype, So Little Fact
Review: I have personally lived through the German occupation of Poland, and I recall those times very well. Jon Avnet's film shows, once again, that film-makers generally have no idea what it was actually like during the German occupation of Poland. The uniforms shown at the beginning of the film, supposedly worn by Poles, are actually the ones worn by the Soviet Army! The numerous other inaccuracies and biases in this film only serve to harm human inter-relationships. The Polish side of the German occupation is completely invisible in this tendacious film. Polish life under German occupation was not much better than those of the Jews. Nevertheless, the Polish spirit was such that it was the Poles who organized the first and longest-lasting resistance to the German occupation. The idea behind showing young Jewish adults willing to fight and then die with dignity is certainly worth showing. But let us also remember that this was only a tiny segment of the entire Jewish community--in Warsaw and elsewhere. The film fails to indicate why the majority of Jews continued to support the policies of Czerniakow, and others who thought like him. At the same time, the film does not show why the majority of Jews, even in 1943, did not support the young Zionists who had been involved in the Uprising. In conclusion, the film fails to illuminate the American audience about the actual realities and plight of the Jewish community, and is totally silent about the parallel Polish side in its suffering and its fight against the Germans.
The film is, unfortunately, another exercise in futility.

Rating:
Summary: An EXCELLENT Buy
Review: A gem of a movie from NBC. Uprising details life in the Warsaw ghetto. An inspirational story for all. I highly reccomend it

Rating:
Summary: The best movie
Review: I thought this movie was very good. the characters were able to pull off the hardships the jews had in the warsaw ghetto. i have been intrested in the Holocaust for a while, and out of all the movies i have seen on it, this one was by far the best.

Rating:
Summary: Very Powerful
Review: I watched the Movie on NBC when it aired. It was an incredibly powerful film. The cast is incredible. Although some of the actors have trouble with their Polish accents, many of them turn out impressive preformances. My one criticism is that Laelee Sobieski's ( think that's how its spelled) was a little flat. It is a triumphant testiment to the situation of hopelessness and anger experienced by the Jewish fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Its worth it, check this one out.

Rating:
Summary: Uprising
Review: I think that this is a very good movie. The writers went to great lengths to make it as realistic as possible. Some of the accents need a little touching up on, but the characters were perfect matches to the actors/actresses. It's very informative and i feel that it would be a good movie to show to a class as background information, or just for your own personal use.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing and Inspiring Heroes
Review: The story of the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Nazis crowded nearly half a million Jews and starved them and beat them while waiting for the death camps to be built, is one of the most horrific stories of the Holocaust. Warsaw had been home to a thriving Jewish population before the Nazis overran Poland in 1939, but the Poles never quite considered the Jews to be real citizens of the nation. Anti-semitism was very deep rooted in Roman Catholic Poland. This film tells the story of a group of young Jews in the ghetto who organized the Jewish Fighting Organization, a resistance movement that was bound and determined to fight the Nazi death machine. And their struggle was a valiant and heroic one. They kept the battle joined for longer than the entire nation of Poland had been able to fend off the Nazis.

This film, like Leon Uris' excellent novel Mila 18, is a great telling of a little known story of the Holocaust. The film moves rapidly from the Nazi invasion of Poland in September of 1939 to the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion in April of 1943. But the viewer never seems lost in the rapid movement of time and history. It covers various aspects of the Final Solution policies rapidly, but explains each one. There are moments of incredible horror and sadness in this film. Seeing observant Jewish men having their beards cut off as Nazi guards laugh; the never ending death cart with its bodies, victims of starvation and disease; the refusal of Polish resistance groups outside the ghetto to aid the fighting, desperate Jews. But in the end, it is a movie about the triumph of the heart and the will. The young Jews in the ghetto, led by Mordecai Anielewicz, are inspiring and heart-rending heroes--plain and simple.

Hank Azaria's performance as the aforementioned Anielewicz is on the mark throughout the film, as is Jon Voight's as the Nazi General Stroop, a man who exudes evil and the unwillingness to accept the truth about what the Jews are doing to his Nazi troops. David Schwemmer and Leelee Sobieski are equally fine as young Jewish ghetto fighters.

This movie deserves to be seen. It will re-inforce the horrors of bigotry and prejudice while at the same time giving a compelling lesson on the strength of the human condition.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding film, brilliantly presented on DVD
Review: Jon Avnet sets out to dispel the myth that the Jewish people were passive in the face of suffering during the Holocaust, and he is successful in doing that. Indeed, he presents a compelling picture of the Warsaw Ghetto in the 1940s that eschews many Jewish stereotypes and cliches. An excellent cast includes Hank Azaria, David Schwimmer, Jon Voigt and Donald Sutherland.

The DVD features take this the extra mile to make it a truly memorable experience. The documentaries, as well as two audio-commentaries (provided by the director and the cast respectively), are full of insights, and only enhanced my appreciation and enjoyment of Avnet's film. This deservedly belongs alongside Schindler's List, and in fact in some ways surpasses it.

Rating:
Summary: A good movie - and read MILA 18
Review: This is a very good TELEVISION movie. We can not forget that it was made for TV. A good companion for this movie it would be to read "MILA 18", by Leon Uris.

It is s solid movie. Of course, when someone talks about the Holocaust, the person is prone to receive a lot of backlash and/or praise. Jan Avnet tried his best, chose good actors (who gave solid performances) to tell this tale of heroism.

It's a highly recommended TV movie, that's for sure.

Rating:
Summary: JEWISH UPRISING IN GHETTO FOR HUMAN DIGNITY
Review: There are some inaccuracies surrounding UPRISING but they are not what Holocaust revisionists complain about in their reviews. Rather, NBC announced that UPRISING is the "first" TV dramatization of the ghetto uprising. That's wrong. A 1982 television movie, THE WALL told essentially the same story. But rather than a docudrama, it was a work of fiction. IN THE PRESENCE OF MINE ENEMIES, a 1996 TV movie, dealt more intimately with this topic.

To begin with, UPRISING is about the 1943 doomed Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto against the occupying Germans. Director and executive producer Jon Avnet (who also made "Fried Green Tomatoes," and "Red Corner") clearly had his heart in this production. He hired a good cast: Hank Azaria, Leelee Sobieski, David Schwimmer, Jon Voight, Donald Sutherland and Cary Elwes. Avnet also built a realistic replica of the Warsaw ghetto in Bratislava, Slovakia including the hand-placed cobblestones. He commisioned a first class score from Oscar winning writer Maurice Jarre.

The action is based on the exploits of the actual members of the Jewish Fighting Organization. Azaria plays the key role of JFO founder Mordechai Anielewicz. UPRISING keeps asking how a moral person can adhere to a moral code in an immoral world. This is always a poignant question in movies about Nazi Germany. The chairman of Warsaw's Jewish Council, Adam Czerniakow (Sutherland), struggles with the dilemma while the Germans corral some 500,000 Jews into the ghetto. He naively chooses cooperation to save lives -- explaining, "I try to minimize the damage." Ultimately, Czerniakow takes his own life when the Germans begin mass deportations to the death camps.

Anielewicz, is a militant Zionist with a more defiant nature than Czerniakow's. He responds with armed resistance whose outcome is certainly death; and honorable death. Schwimmer and a contemplative Sobieski are among fighters who join him. Voight portrays the German Gen. Jurgen Stroop who is sent in to put down the uprising. In a grotesquely comic scene, a Nazi propagandist (Elwes) directs a film about ghetto life. Sutherland plays Czerniakow sitting in his office, is his reluctant subject. A menorah has been placed on Czerniakow's desk, and wax drips onto the desktop as Czerniakow fumbles for something to say on camera. Elwes completes his phony tableau by ordering Czerniakow to churn his hands, because "Jewish people usually move their hands around when they talk."

Alas, UPRISING does not manage to succeed in providing a sense of the uplifting triumph that it attempts from a handful of Jewish fighters escaping Warsaw as Stroop fumes in humiliation. The survivors are too emotionally drained to be jubilant. But by and large, UPRISING makes its point.

To those who wished UPRISING would "balance" the 3-million Poles who died during World War II against the 6-million Jews are either naively mixing apples and oranges, at best, or thinly veiling homocidal anti-Semitism at worst. By today's military jargon, the 3-million Polish "gentiles" were tragic victims of "collateral damage" during the invasion by the Nazi Germany's Wehrmacht into and occupation of Poland. It is not true that "the 3 million Polish gentiles were ALSO victims of the Holocaust." The Holocaust was the end result of a plan formally called the Final Solution to the Jewish Question designed in Wansee, Germany several years earlier. The "Final Solution" was based on perverted and scientifically fraudulent eugenics theories for getting rid of all Jews as a global, Nazi "public health" project. The Holocaust, as it is now called, was specifically designed to hunt down, steal property from, and then murder Polish men, women and children who had only one thing in common. Each of them was a Jew. UPRISING makes this very clear. Those disappointed in its sympathtic portrayal of the handful of Jewish resistance fighters in the Warsaw ghetto may find old propaganda films by Josef Goebels more satisfying. In his films, Goebels managed to dehumanize Jews to the point where certain sub-strata in each society could find it very appealing to rob and then murder these people.

What UPRISING revisits is how alone in the world Polish Jews had become. Yes, of course, in very rare instances a few decent Poles took their humanity and Christianity seriously. They risked their lives to protect a few of their countrymen, who happened to be Jews, against the German Nazi onslaught. But that was untypical. Even more rare were those instances in which the herded Polish Jewish population rose up against their Nazi oppressors. This happened for some 28 days in a walled off section of the city of Warsaw called a ghetto. Life on the outside went on more or less normally as inside the ghetto Jews were stripped of their dignity and starved to death. When it became clear to the victims that the Germans planned to have all of them taken away to Auschwitz and murdered, a handful of them rose up to steal back some of their dignity by choosing a warrior's death. That is what UPRISING is about. Good movie!

Rating:
Summary: Years later, but we must never forget...
Review: I have seen a variety of Holocaust films, due to my interest in World War II, and I would have to say this is probably one of the best, if not the best, that I've ever seen.

Uprising brings to us everything that Schindler's List does: touching story, great cinematography, and good actors. However, instead of focusing on a middleman such as Schindler (German helping Jews), this film focuses on the Jews helping themselves.

The emotions were strongly carried through due to overall great performances from many actors: Leelee Sobieski, Hank Azaria, David Schwimmer, Donald Sutherland, and many more.

This is film of hope, love, and cherishing life while you have it, all while in the toughest of times. These people overcame enormous odds by standing up to the oppressive and barbarous reign of the Germans, and not unlike one of the German characters, we now have it on film. Moreover, it is a great film.